Is there a name for that genre of turn-of-the-90s pop-rock with the positive vibes, huge guitar leads, and gated drums?

et cetera. In a lot of ways this stuff is a logical progression of things that are generically "80s" (the Phil Collins drums especially) but there's still a distinctive sound to these '90-'91 rock singles. I remember ads that used to run for "Awesomely 90s" K-Tel type CDs, and they were full of this stuff and absolutely nothing that I would later think of as "90s Rock." One can imagines an entire alternate, Nirvanaless 90s rock history-that-might-have-been.

So what do we call this music? And what are some more examples? What about stuff from later in the decade that fits in just fine with this evolutionary tree, turning a total blind eye to grunge? Etc.

That's an interesting question, but unfortunately I can't place the School of Fish or Roxette songs at the moment. And wasn''t the Jesus Jones song more associated with a Madchester/baggy thing, or even Grebo?

Do you guys remember people around that time saying "I listen to progressive music"?

Damn, that was a confusing time to like college, er...modern rock, er...alternative. I'd probably just go with "pop rock". That's probably too nebulous, but it's a pretty acurate description of those acts.

On a side note, I was really into what dell calls a Madchester/baggy thing, or even Grebo at the time, but probably just called it modern rock or progressive (thanks, WHFS!). I remember hearing people refer to the city of Manchester as "Madchester", but never heard any of these genre names. Was I out of the loop, or did we 'Muricans just not latch on to these tags?

Wonderful picks everybody! "Dizz Knee Land" is one of those songs I've managed to hear of a million times but never actually hear before, and it fits right in there in the more "alternative" wing of the genre, along with "Three Strange Days." And yeah, "Three Strange Days" is fantastic.

My wife has this friend, and he showed up late to this party last year...I asked him why he'd been late and he said, "Oh well, I wanted to come earlier but I went to the Fine Line cuz my favorite band was playing"

"Black Or White" also features Macaulay Culkin and a pan-racial, pan-national, "the Cold War is over! the future is bright!" message which only adds to the positive vibes. See also "Right Here Right Now."

A lot of examples aren't fitting together for me, but there is a certain guitar sound running through a bunch of them that seems telling: a rhythm guitar thing, up front in the mix, somewhat think (or at least not taking up a ton of space) and usually verging on staccato or telegraph -- the opposite of the sludgy/blurry blanket the other end of alt-rock would bring in.

"Black or White" has this hardcore
School of Fish do, if I remember right
Roxette kicked this a TON, being a duo
"Two Princes" had it (most Spin Doctors, really)
"Life is a Highway"

I think the paradigm that's getting pinned down here is one where rock bands are uptempo rhythm machines, with the rhythm sections having really mild doses of funkiness or propulsion, and that's supposed to be sufficient enough on its own that the guitar doesn't need to occupy all the space above it. Whereas the alt paradigm that comes after it is very guitar-blanket and would have no truck with a guitar playing a scratch rhythm line (like the one on "Life is a Highway" especially), and the rhythm sections aren't treated as sufficient -- in fact, they usually have to lay down a fuzzy rhythm guitar just playing the chords on eighth notes before they can move on toward adding another guitar to play even simple leads.

That would seem like a turn in a bad direction, and kinda was, except that the turn-of-90s stuff had a huge problem: it tended to sound like a drum machine and a Very Corny Bassist playing out of a karaoke box while some guy played rhythm Strat as if there were actually a band around. I think the late 80s and early 90s were kind of a horrible end point of using technology to make really slick, artificial music, but still aspiring to make it in the mold of, like, 60s American rock'n'roll classics, blues, funk, and all -- by the end of the 80s we were getting these weird chromed-out replicas of the old stuff, old-school R'n'R played on digital keyboards and triggered gated drums, and it started to feel uncomfortable, and that sort of thing seems to have died hard going into the next decade.

Wonderful posts nabisco. I'm not sure how much I buy the narrative but it's nice to see one being floated, particularly one focusing in on "that guitar sound" that I've had a hard time putting into words.

So does this mean that there were no heirs to this lineage? That alt-rock's influence, even on people that were ultimately not consuming alt-rock albums, was to restate a certain standard of "authenticity" when one was to undertake doing genre work? That is, the bands of the late 90s working "in the mold of, like, 60s American rock'n'roll classics, blues, funk, and all" seem to have gone for a much more "organic"-sounding production. Fastball comes immediately to mind, but I suppose that a lot of the pop-rock which is so reviled by rockist CW would fit in here - Matchbox 20, Hootie, Deep Blue Something - not "alternative" bands in any sonic sense but they seem to have absorbed the ethos.

This also makes me wonder how many of the Post-Cannibals records were the result of "alt" bands showing up in the studio with producers who only knew how to make certain kinds of records. The School of Fish song seems to make a case for this - everything about it besides the production suggests that these guys walked in the door as a garage psychedelia band.

Seems like some movie soundtrack hits from 89 and 90 might fit this bill. Interesting ideas from Nabisco here -- kind of like sounds from the 60s-channeling baby boomer demographic finally grappling with these technologies.

So the more I think about it, the more I can't tell if the development I'm talking about was a good one or not. Doctor Casino is totally right: most anyone making an old-school rock'n'roll record after 92 or so would shoot for production that sounded natural, "vintage." And while this was WAY less embarrassing, it feels weird to applaud a development that put stuff in a glass case to be properly preserved and recreated.

Movie soundtracks are a great example of this, Mark! I'd trace it back toward the early 80s, where you have two things going: (a) the shine and ambition of prog and "yacht rock" have kinda died, and (b) you have one of rock's early generations first hitting the question of how to be an older rocker. (E.g., Rod Stewart is all over MTV).

And if you look at big movie-sountrack type hits in particular, a ridiculous number of them are pastiches of rock's early days -- a lot of them lyrically about the roots of rock:

- Huey Lewis is all "The Heart of Rock and Roll is the Beat"
- George Thoroughgood is doing "Bad to the Bone" blues pastiche
- Billy Joel is going further back and doing doo-wop pastiche like "Uptown Girl"
- "Old Time Rock and Roll" by Bob Seger!
- I would kinda class "Footloose" here too
- and stuff like Aretha singing "Freeway of Love!"

Plus stuff like Mellencamp and Tom Petty -- it was like everyone soldifying a mythology of what rock'n'roll was, only nobody yet felt like there was some great incompatibility between classic rock/soul and 80s production techniques. (It surely helped that the people working in big studios, the session players, the label heads and producers, and plenty of the stars had genuinely been working since the glory days.)

Point being that seems to fall apart right around "Life is a Highway," or something. (I would go on and on about the details of this, but I don't think they're hard to imagine; there was a kind of changing of the guard here, I think.)

This is the continuing application of mid 80s pop production to rock music, right? Sound of Bob Clearmountain on Bryan Adams Reckless and Hall & Oates Big Bam Boom, and of Mutt Lange on tons of stuff (AC/DC, Def Lep, Huey Lewis, the Cars' Heartbeat City, etc.). Kind of based in dance music in the first place - Clearmountain worked with Chic. Vic Maile did some similar stuff in England, though he's more associated with hard rock bands.

By the time you get to the 90s, the drums aren't quite so prominent & boomy, the once-trendy new wave dance elements starting to shrivel, more naturalistic production coming back into favor.

Yes, isn't it awful how those who hate recent bands writing great melodic songs meet with opposition on ILM these days? Wasn't it so much better back in 2001 when everyone agreed that melodic music should be buried forever and white males with guitars should never again be allowed to make music?

Also, several years late and not really in the genre at all.... but germane to any discussion of Post-Cold-War Rock: Phil Collins's ridiculously upbeat "Dance Into The Light." We are one world - we have-a one voice!

(The production is closer to the overstuffed world-beat of "Circle of Light" than anything on this thread.)

I saw Dada live open up for Uncle Tupelo on the tour after Anodyne came out. I seem to remember them being pretty good actually, but I don't ever remember hearing one of their CDs.

I don't quite know about the huge guitar part as they were a bit more subdued, but I think Del Amtri's "Kiss This Thing Goodbye" fit into this genre. They got brighters and sunnier as they went on, but I think Toad the Wet Sprocket might fit into this too.

Hrrrrmrmrmr, yeah, I dunno. Much fuller sound than these other things, and no chunky/scratchy rhythm guitar up front. On the other hand, the solo is exactly the kind of legible, arcing sound I hear on these other records, and the clobbering drums come in on the second chorus but good. And overall it's got the same kind of propulsive, "Edge of Seventeen" feeling as some of these.

Euler made the "New Country" connection above and I think that whole area would be interesting to explore. In general (and I am out of my depth here) but it seems like country tries to avoid sounding like it was made by studio robots, as a rule - there's the faith/image that at some point there was a hard-playin', tight backing band that gets together and records. So something like Travis Tritt's "T.R.O.U.B.L.E." starts out sounding like it's going to totally be one of these songs; there's a huge thudding WHAMMMO drum like two seconds in - but then the rest of the band shows up and starts to boogie.

At the same time, I think traces of this whole thing may have survived longer in country than anywhere else - rock went through various phases of sludge and wash and guitars-in-the-red, but clean, bright, super-shiny sounds never entirely went away in country. And you have people like Mutt Lange doing their biggest records way later - "Man! I Feel Like A Woman" is totally the heir of this sound, to the point where they decided to do a Robert Palmer pastiche for the video even though it's not actually a "retro"-styled song.

I love "Forever Young" - but in the way of a song I remember hearing a fair number of times as a kid and then never again until, like, last week. Where are you hearing it? I must go to different dentist's offices or something.

Also, perhaps, Jellyfish - "That Is Why", maybe the La's "There She Goes". If it had arrived a few years later, I'd include XTC's "Mayor of Simpleton" (their biggest US hit, despite the lyric about not being able to write a big hit song). If it had arrived a few years earlier, Hootie's "Time".

Wow, right on about Bryan Adams. "Can't Stop This Thing We Started" and "All I Want Is You" are definitely right in there. Trending a little rootsier but yeah. Will have to dig into the other last couple things, not familiar with 'em.

Wow, never heard this before. I think it fits. Sounds like another one that started out as a different kind of band and found themselves sounding Post-Cold-War in the studio. Some overlap with the clean-sounding, poppier side of college/alt rock, e.g. Gin Blossoms.